Labor Migration and Social Networks Participation: Evidence from Southern Mozambique

There is a large literature pointing to community participation and social networks as salient components of household well-being in developing settings. Yet, there are few insights into whether people mobility affects incentive problems associated with social networks, or whether labor migration displaces social informal institutions in village economies at origin. This paper directly tests the role of international migration in shaping participation in groups and social networks by migrant sending households in village economies at origin. By using an original household survey from two southern regions in Mozambique, we find that households with successful migrants (i.e. those receiving either remittances or return migration) engage more in community based social networks. Our findings are robust to alternative definitions of social interaction and to endogeneity concerns suggesting that stable migration ties and higher income stability through remittances may decrease participation constraints and increase household commitment in cooperative arrangements in migrant-sending communities.